“I wonder who’s kissing her now,” my friend “Colleen” sang, from a ballad her grandmother used to warble in the kitchen.
We were playing “Your Family Bursts Into Song,” a game we’d just invented.
I did remember the kissing song. My father, an Irish tenor, loved the second line as he remembered it: “I wonder who’s milking the cow.”
Until now, I never doubted his version. He’s been gone for 25 years, and the kitchen’s been gone since the 1980s.
But the song is family lore, along with “Danny Boy” and “The Rose of Tralee,” the favorite ballad of displaced Irishmen in Australia. They’d turn toward Dublin, hoist a few, and wail with maudlin soul: “She was lovely and fair, as the rose of the summer . . .” In the end, because it’s an Irish ballad, she dies, of course.
But if someone also kissed her, no cows were milked for the occasion.
According to crooner Perry Como’s version, it’s actually “I wonder who’s showing her how.”
Showing her what? That’s what I really want to sing. Or moo.
That was a favorite in our family sing-alongs, also. Lovely to hear it again. No cows were involved, however.
A lovely tail. I mean, tale.